I meant prison vs. jail. It seems mildly blurry to me considering that in my country we do have some distinctions between different types of detainment facilities but from what I grasped, the distinctions are delineated somewhat differently in the US that they are around here.
I see that someone answered, but the cultural feel is that jail time is anything from a few hours to a few years for reasons that could include public drunkenness, assault, prostitution, or just awaiting trial, it's kind of ambiguous what it means when someone was in "jail", but it could really be no big deal. Most cities or towns would have a jail.
Prison is a bigger deal. A prisoner was convicted for something unambiguously bad, and there is this cultural expectation that they have become somewhat hardened or institutional in prison. A state or Feds would run a prison.
While I've known people to be in jail for longer sentences than prisoners, the expectation is that prison sentences are much longer.
I'm speaking only to the social meaning of the two concepts, which might help to understand the underlying understanding that Americans share about this difference, but the actual legal realities are no doubt quite different. Most of us are pretty naive about our legal system.
Ah, this is interesting. I thought we had a somewhat clearer distinction in my country since we call "věznice" ("prison", presumably) the facility where you serve your sentence, and we call "vazební věznice" (literally "detention prison", I guess?) the facility where you're detained before your sentence and while your court case is pending. This would seem to indicate that these are separate facilities. But then I went to check the list of "detention prisons" (there's like nine of them or so) and it turned out that there's a wing for sentenced prisoners in pretty much all of them. So in fact our "detention prisons" would seem to be like US jails in function (with the exception that drunk people don't end up in jail -- they're taken to "záchytka" instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunk_tank#Czech_Republic).
Having said that, the operating term is still "věznice" here; there's no word with different etymology for it. Colloquially, it's called "vězení" -- we have a form of limited diglossia in my country where you commonly wouldn't use formal names of things in normal speech without sounding weird, so some phrases are somewhat different in speech than they often are in writing. And additionally, while you would say "byl jsem ve vězení" ("I was in prison") after serving a sentence, if you were detained before sentencing, you'd say "byl jsem ve vazbě" ("I was in pre-trial detention"), NOT anything like "Byl jsem ve vazebním vězení" ("I was in jail"). So we don't really have this distinction you could make between "people who did unambiguously bad things" and "people who did some light infractions". Basically you have no way to make it sound like what you did was no big deal -- everyone convicted is a prisoner and that's it (if institutionalized, that is; not after a suspended sentence, fine, or community service of course). But in American English, you apparently do. Interesting.
My homeland being the US, which has a notoriously dysfunctional incarceration system. It's amazing that the Czech drunk tank is concerned with treatment!
If you want to be specific jail can be used to describe a place for those awaiting trial or held for minor crimes, whereas prison describes a place for criminals convicted of serious crimes.
